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Donald Trump Promises to Bring Back Waterboarding and Worse Torture: 'If It Doesn't Work, They Deserve It Anyway'

Donald Trump is doubling down on his promise to reinstate waterboarding as an accepted form of interrogation – and taking it one step further by saying he’d approve even worse torture.

“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would – in a heartbeat,” Trump said to cheers during a rally in Columbus, Ohio, Monday night, according to The Washington Post. “And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.”

Trump added that waterboarding – a controversial interrogation tactic that was banned by the Obama administration and classified by the United Nations as torture – is what’s needed to deal with terrorists who “chop off our young people’s heads” and “build these iron cages, and they’ll put 20 people in them and they drop them in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull them up 15 minutes later.”

“It works,” Trump repeated of waterboarding. “Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”

Trump first vowed to bring back waterboarding on Sunday during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, saying of ISIS, “I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they do to us.”

“What they’re doing to us, what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head, that’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation,” he added.

Trump’s waterboarding remarks are the latest in a string of controversial comments he’s made over the past few days.

On Saturday, he repeated his claim that he saw thousands of New Jersey Arabs cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 – an urban myth police have said never happened.

On Sunday, he was branded racist after he tweeted a graphic with fake statistics about murders in the U.S. that depicted black people as the biggest perpetrators.

That same day, he suggested that the Black Lives Matter activist who was physically attacked when he disrupted the real estate mogul’s speech at a campaign rally Saturday “should have been roughed up” because he was “so obnoxious and loud.”

Nevertheless, a new national poll from FOX News shows Trump has more support than ever from Republican primary voters.

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